down in the posting mines / poking at ghosts
Hello! I’ve been sleeping so badly this week, oh my god. I often write my weekly essay in advance then add the intro on the day so truly I cannot make any promises, wrt the quality of at least half of what follows. I know it’s a solid idea but can I put it into words in a way that makes sense? Only one way to find out!
Before I do that though, I’d like to thank everyone who took advantage of the flash sale last week and shelled out for a paying subscription to this Substack. It was very nice of you and I appreciate it a lot. I suspect you already know this, but there are also 15 months’ worth of archives on here, if you want to really get some bang for your buck.
Anyway! We were talking about social media on Bluesky yesterday - you really should join Bluesky if you still haven’t, by the way - and I think I ended up stumbling into a half-decent theory on why social media platforms work or fail. I call it the Posting Middle Classes Theory.
It began forming when I tried to think about why Threads had been such a flop, despite being owned by Meta and them making it incredibly easy to create an account via Instagram. I’ve never actually used Threads myself but am told that its main problem is the algorithmic timeline, which you can’t turn off and which just isn’t very good.
